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It may seem mad, or the extremes of hubris, to assert that after more than 5,000 years of slavery, we will bring it to an end. Slavery has been a permanent part of the human existence throughout all of human history, but like smallpox or the burning of witches, its time is over. Human slavery may seem the immovable monolith, but it is actually a weak shell ready to topple. There will be pockets of resistance to ending slavery, but for most of the 27 million slaves in the world today the transition to citizenship and restored dignity is not just immediately possible, it is inevitable.

Fewer Hurdles
There are a number of reasons why eradication is possible, and a favorable social, political, and economic context provides a foundation. This can be seen in three key challenges that we do not have to face. The first is that we do not have to win the moral argument against slavery; no government or organized interest group is pressing the case that slavery is desirable or even acceptable. No priest or minister is standing in the pulpit and giving biblical justifications for slavery. No philosophers offer up rationalizations for slavery. In fact, with the exception of a handful of criminals, the world is united in its condemnation of slavery. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights simply underscores this, placing freedom from slavery at the top of the list of fundamental rights. The moral challenge today is how we can act effectively on our universally held belief in the absolute and essential equality of human dignity.

The second challenge that we do not have to face is the argument that slavery is necessary for our economic well-being. The actual monetary value of slavery in the world economy is extremely small. One estimate states that all the work done by slaves world-wide is worth about $13 billion per annum, the same amount that spam emails cost the commercial world each year. A recent study by the United Nations estimated that global profits from human trafficking are about $31 billion a year. This sounds like a lot of money, and it is, but to put it into perspective, consumers in the United States are expected to spend $31 billion buying doors and windows in 2007. In the global economy this is a small drop in a large ocean. The end of slavery threatens the livelihood of no country or industry. No country can say, “We would like to end slavery, but we just can’t afford it”. In fact, just the opposite is true. While slaves may make money for slaveholders, they are a drag on a country’s economy. They contribute little to national production; their work is concentrated on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, doing low-skill jobs that are dirty and dangerous. Slaves work both ineffectively and as little as they can, and who can blame them? The value of their work is stolen and pocketed by criminals. Economically, except for the criminals, slaves are a waste. They contribute next to nothing to a country’s economy; they buy nothing in a country’s markets. They are actually an untapped economic resource.

In Northern India models of community-based liberation and economic reintegration are being tested and polished. In more than one hundred villages the story is the same, with only a little assistance freed slaves dramatically increase their incomes, and choose to immediately invest in education for their children, improving their food consumption and health, and then buying assets that provide a livelihood such as land and livestock. For poor countries, significantly increasing the earning and spending of ex-slaves would be a small but important boost to the national economy. At the international level if you compare countries on the strength of their economy and how many slaves they have, the picture is clear – the more slaves, the weaker the economy. There is simply no economic reason to keep slavery alive.

The third great challenge that we do not have to face is the one celebrated widely in 2007 – the necessity to pass laws against slavery. For the most part, the laws needed to end slavery are already on the books. Around the world some of these laws need updating and expanding, and some need their penalties increased. Many anti-slavery laws are waiting for the allocation of funds needed to train police in their use. And given the international nature of human trafficking, nearly all these laws need to be brought into harmony with each other. Many improvements are needed, but nowhere on earth is slavery legal. To end slavery we need the political will to enforce law, not campaigns to make new law. The most important laws needing enactment are those appropriating funds to pay for eradication.
How much will it cost to end slavery?

Let’s go back to Northern India for an example of the cost of liberation. Debt bondage slavery in South Asia accounts for as many as 10 million of the world’s slaves. Since an enslaved family’s work is considered collateral, not repayment of their loan, this form of slavery is often hereditary. It is not unusual to find families in their third and fourth generation of debt bondage slavery in Northern India, completely unaware that a life in freedom is possible. All the worst features of slavery mark debt bondage: violence, rape, degradation, malnutrition, and hopelessness. If we can crack this form of slavery literally millions will come to freedom. The good news is that the programs for liberation and reintegration are well developed and well tested. If we go back over several years and add together the costs of paying the outreach workers, their transportation to rural villages, of organizing, guaranteeing seed money, and maintaining the micro-credit unions, of keeping the local organization’s office ticking over, and so forth, then divide that sum by the number of families they help to freedom in a year, the result is about £19.

So, for the price of a nice lunch or a pair of blue jeans, a family goes from slavery to freedom. None of that money goes to pay off the illegal debt that holds the family in bondage or to give money to criminals to “buy” the slave’s freedom. What it does include is the cost of helping the family achieve an independent life and getting their children to school. The project helps villagers to organize themselves and to know and safeguard their legal rights. It leads to families getting control of the means to earn an independent living. Freedom may be precious, but it doesn’t have to be expensive.

The cost of freedom is important because governments run on money. It would be possible to look to individuals and charities to bankroll the end of slavery, but since every government agrees this is a crime, and since practically every citizen of every country condemns slavery, could there be a better expression of our common will through our elected governments? In any event, we have tried the gradual approach of asking charities to do this job, now it is time finish the job once and for all. The aim for our charitable giving, both as individuals and trusts, is to continue to support the work of liberation but also to fund the work needed to bring governments fully into play. An increased emphasis and support for increasing the participation of governments will leverage the funds needed for real eradication.

Knowing what it will cost to end slavery in a country makes it possible to build an effective strategy for eradication with meaningful government participation. Remarkably, the balance of costs and benefits for ending slavery makes it a great investment. Let’s assume a higher cost for freeing slaves than the £19 figure for liberation and a new life in India. In Ghana it costs about £200 to free a child from slavery in the fishing industry, place them in a shelter, give them the care they need, reunite them with their family, and help that family build its earnings so that they are no longer vulnerable to human trafficking. This is probably closer to an average cost worldwide. What would that mean in terms of the price of ending all slavery? If there are 27 million slaves, our best estimate, then ending slavery on the planet earth would cost £5.4 billion. That is far beyond the reach of human rights organizations, but it is one percent of the current annual budget of the UK government. Freedom is not just affordable, it’s a bargain. And there is no reason to assume that Britain has to pay the whole bill for eradication, shared amongst the rich countries, the cost would be pennies per person – painless and possible.

These cost comparisons are important because they show that money is not the barrier to ending slavery. They demonstrate that with political will and a fairly small amount of input, eradication is achievable. Of course, it is true that freedom for many slaves will cost more than the £200 per child in Ghana, for example, and helping people who have been trafficked into Europe and North America will be even more expensive. When the human traffickers linked to organized criminal gangs need to be caught and punished, the price will be even higher. These criminal networks are notoriously hard to crack. Likewise, there are many parts of the world where the poverty that increases the vulnerability to slavery is so acute that fundamental changes will need to be made. Then there are the governments that are tacitly supporting slavery, exploiting their own citizens as forced labor. These unelected dictatorships, as “sovereign nations”, will require expensive diplomatic and economic leverage. But even if the cost of global freedom doubles or triples, it is still a relatively small sum, an infinitesimally small fraction of the global economy. And, as we’ve seen, stable and sustainable freedom generates economic growth and thus pays for itself.
If we can afford it, how do we actually do it?

The abolitionists of the past had the great benefit of a precise goal – passing a law to make slavery illegal. We will never have that luxury; there is no magic bullet that will eradicate slavery, but there are many known avenues to freedom. While the basic conditions of slavery are fundamentally the same the world over, every slave lives and suffers in a unique situation. The social, cultural, political, economic, and sometimes religious, packaging that is wrapped around slavery in different countries and cultures means that our eradication methods will tend to follow general patterns that are then adapted to each unique setting. While some slaves can be freed individually, in some cases whole communities need to be freed together to ensure a sustainable liberation.

One avenue leads us to think hard about the products we buy that are tainted with slavery. None of us like that fact that cotton, cocoa, sugar, steel, even some of the metal in mobile phones and computers, may have been produced with slavery. The total volume of these slave-made commodities is actually very small. Only a tiny fraction of the world’s cotton or cocoa or steel has slave input. The problem is that it is almost impossible to know which shirt or chocolate bar or chair carries slavery into your home. The criminals using slaves sell their produce into the market like everyone else, and it flows into the global market and mixes with products of free workers. While the criminals may justify their use of slaves by pointing to economic pressures to reduce labor costs, they never pass the savings from slavery to the consumer. The slaveholder pockets the market price for his slave-made goods – a price set in a market that reflects the presence of free workers. So, if slaveholders are feeding on our purchases, it would seem that we should just stop buying those goods. In fact, that may be exactly the wrong thing to do.
The revulsion we feel when we think we are eating something or wearing something that comes from slave labor is strong. Our reaction is to push that crime away from us, to distance ourselves. The last thing we want to do is support slaveholders in their crime. Yet, for every criminal using slaves to grow cocoa or cotton or sugar, there are hundreds or thousands of farmers producing the same crops without using slaves. Great agri-businesses are involved and every size of farm in between. Small farmers in the developing world have enough problems competing against the vast subsidies given to U.S. and European agri-business, if the consumers turn against them as well the result could be destitution and potentially enslavement. So, while our disgust says, “boycott”, the truth is that boycotts can hurt the innocent more than the guilty. We think of ourselves as consumers. We want to vote in the marketplace for the things we believe in. But this problem can’t normally be fixed at the point of purchase.

Let’s follow the path of a shirt tainted with slave-grown cotton. The point of purchase is the last stop in a long line from the farm to you. The cotton grown and picked with slave labor piles up at the cotton gin with all the other cotton for processing. Packed into bales, the ginned cotton, now a mixture of “free” and “slave” cotton, moves to a factory for carding, spinning and weaving. That factory may be in another country or even another continent. The product chain stretches out and over borders: spun thread is made into cloth, it goes to a mill for dying or printing; then from mill to factory for cutting and sewing; then from factory to distribution centre for packaging and shipping, finally it reaches a wholesaler who sends it to the retail shop where you find it on the rack. Behind that shirt are the truck drivers and sales people, the seamstresses, the mill and factory hands, the gin workers, and the transport workers who drove the raw cotton to the gin. At the beginning of the chain are lots of farmers and a handful of slaves. Along this chain, some of the workers are paid well, some are being exploited, and some aren’t paid at all. Boycotting that shirt can hurt them all.

The place to stop slavery is not at the cash register; it has to be stopped where it happens – on the farm, quarry, or sweatshop. The £20 you don’t spend boycotting a shirt is worth little or nothing to the fight against slavery. The slaveholder has already had his profit on the front end, and if boycott leads to a collapse in cotton prices, the slaveholder just moves his slaves to another job, or dumps them, or worse. Meanwhile, boycott driven unemployment puts other farmers and mill hands at risk of enslavement. A boycott is a blunt instrument, sometimes it is exactly the right tool, but often it runs the risk of creating more suffering than it cures. Sometimes the immediate and obvious answer isn’t the right one.

Fortunately, there is another way that is more effective. If companies work with anti-slavery groups, taking responsibility for their product chains and establishing systems that root out slavery at the farm gate, then the slavery can be removed from the product at its source. To take the slavery out of cotton or cocoa or any other product you have to set slaves free and bust the criminals that enslave them. You also have to crack the system feeding slavery into the product chain; otherwise criminals will just suck more people into slavery. Once they are freed, ex-slaves need support to build independent stable lives. Here the circle closes and the way ahead becomes more clear. The £20 you might spend on a shirt is the cost of freeing a family in Northern India. Don’t stop buying shirts, just start investing in freedom and urging businesses to join with consumers, churches and governments in ending slavery for good.

Using our power as consumers is just one way ahead. If we start at the grassroots and work up we can see many more ways to stop slavery. At the level of farms and villages there are individuals risking their lives to help others out of slavery. There are also the local anti-slavery and human rights organizations that support these workers. To increase their impact and free more slaves, at least three things need to happen. The first is that local anti-slavery workers need to be protected. There are martyrs today, people we never hear about. Those of us who live in the rich North need to keep reminding governments that these heroes are the sharp end of the tool that breaks chains and that they deserve our support. The second thing needed at the grassroots is the money to expand those programs that are successful. Careful tracking shows efficient and powerful local programs on every continent, and nearly every one of these is limping along on a shoestring. This borders on criminal neglect, if there are slaves in front of us and we know an efficient way to liberation, then we need to put our money where our mouths are. Thirdly, we need to clone the liberators. It is a perfectly reasonable goal to say, “Where there is one liberator today, there will be three next year.” In spite of the danger, there is no shortage of people ready to do this work. This is simply a resource question. We need to find the best anti-slavery workers and then invest in giving them apprentices, extending their reach and activity. Every one of these points can be achieved, to use organization-speak, through good human resource management.

Supporting individual anti-slavery workers is not the way to end slavery for good, but it is the job that needs doing now. These liberators are like the emergency aid workers fighting an epidemic. For every epidemic research is needed; health policies have to change; the whole public health system of sewers, water treatment, and hospitals needs to be re-built, but when people are starting to die today someone needs to deliver the vaccine and the food today. Today there are slaves waiting to be freed. As we begin the long process of turning the giant super-tankers of government and building the international alliance against slavery, these grassroots workers are all that usually stands between slaves and a lifetime of slavery.

At the level of governments two related and achievable actions will be take place in the next five to ten years. I say this with a degree of certainty because lawmakers in many countries of the rich North are already preparing to move ahead. The first action is that the rich countries will devote the necessary diplomatic and financial resources to make the end of slavery a priority. There are many carrots and a few sticks that might be offered to countries that continue to have high levels of slavery. The second is that some of these resources will be directed to the Global South to support the enforcement of local laws against slavery and the establishment of sustainable lives for ex-slaves. Remember that the total number of slaves in the world means that this is a problem within our collective and governmental grasp, if we choose to reach for it. The US, for example, has recently given other countries more than $2 billion to help them better enforce anti-drug laws, it is a pattern easily replicated for anti-slavery laws.

At the international level other existing patterns of research, policy, diplomacy, and outreach can be easily transferred to ending slavery. We know that when governments really get involved in collective international effort big changes can happen. In 1988 the Global Polio Eradication campaign began, with nearly every government in the world promising to take part. In that year, the crippling polio disease was active in one hundred twenty-five countries. By 2003, there were only six countries left with active polio. As with many diseases, it will be difficult to wipe out the polio virus completely, but millions of children and adults have been saved from being crippled by the campaign. Slavery can also go from global, pernicious and pervasive to being a rare crime on the watch list.

We are all familiar with the role of UN Weapons Inspectors, their job has been to ensure that countries are keeping the promises they have made when ratifying UN conventions on weapons of mass destruction. Given that essentially every country in the world has ratified the various UN anti-slavery conventions, and that prohibitions against slavery have been ruled to be universal and fundamental by international courts, it is perfectly reasonable to establish UN Slavery Inspectors. Their job would be to help countries identify and correct holes in the enforcement of their own laws and their international commitments. Notice that none of these steps require any radical new approaches or rules. Existing structures, tools, and methods simply need to be turned with sufficient focus and resource to push slavery into the waste bin with polio.
Life after slavery – no freedom without forgiveness?

No other country in the world so dramatically demonstrates the consequences of a botched emancipation as the United States. America has suffered, and continues to suffer, from the injustice perpetrated on ex-slaves. Generations of African-Americans were sentenced to second-class status, exploited, denied, and abused. Without education and basic resources it was very difficult for African-American families to build the economic foundation needed for full participation and well-being in America. Today there are laws that have criminals make restitution for what they have stolen, for the damage they have inflicted. No such restitution came for the stolen lives of millions of slaves.

At the end of the American Civil War nearly four million ex-slaves were dumped into the society and economy of the United States with little preparation. Today there are some 27 million slaves in the world. If we can end slavery in this generation, which is a real possibility, do we really want the next four, five, or twenty generations to face the problems of emancipation gone wrong? Our aim in ending slavery cannot be the creation of a population whose suffering and anger spills out over the decades. Helping freed slaves achieve full lives is one of the best investments a government or a society can make. We know the alternative, that way lies a horrible waste of human potential. It also gives birth to anger, retribution, vengeance, hatred, and violence. In fact, one of the most profound questions about slavery and freedom that remains unanswered is this: even if there is restitution, can there be forgiveness?

Those who have suffered enslavement may well say that this is a crime beyond forgiveness. It is no momentary act of violence, no crime of passion, but a systematic brutality and exploitation that can stretch over generations. It combines within itself the most horrible crimes known – torture, rape, kidnap, murder, and the willful destruction of the human mind and spirit. It is exploitation, injustice, and violence all rolled together into their most potent forms. The damage it does and has done is inestimable, and damage that includes the minds deeply injured by enslavement.

The minds injured by slavery include the minds of the slaveholders. By dehumanizing another person in order to enslave them, the slaveholder dehumanizes himself. Those of us with little direct experience of slavery find it hard to feel any concern for the slaveholder, but many of those who have lived in slavery recognize the damage slavery does to the master as well. A community that allows slavery in its midst is sick to its roots. For the ex-slave to grow as a citizen that sickness needs to be treated, especially because many freed slaves live in the same area where they were enslaved. Ex-slaves and their slaveholders may see each other regularly. If injustices are allowed to fester, it will be impossible for either group to move on. In America, the ugly sickness of slavery re-emerged in segregation, discrimination, and lynch law. In part, this was because most Americans sought to ignore the legacy of slavery. The immediate needs of freed slaves were not met in the years following 1865, and ever since there has been an attempt to draw the curtain over the past, to let bygones be bygones.

We can see a parallel in post-apartheid South Africa. Faced with the large-scale horrific murders and torture of the past, many people in that country argued that collective amnesia would best serve the reconstruction of a truly democratic state. But Desmond Tutu explained that: “Our common experience in fact is the opposite – that the past, far from disappearing or lying down and being quiet, is embarrassingly persistent, and will return and haunt us unless it has been dealt with adequately. Unless we look the beast in the eye we will find that it returns to hold us hostage.” In America that beast has been on the prowl for more than 100 years, and has evolved into new forms of discrimination, recrimination, and injustice. Putting down that beast is one of America’s greatest challenges. Ensuring that same beast never grows up when slaves are freed today is a challenge for the whole world.

To ensure that freed slaves build new lives, and that communities overcome the sickness of slavery, to find the best ways to liberate slaves and to help governments enforce their own anti-slavery laws, means building a sound understanding of what slavery is today and discovering best points of intervention. We cannot solve a problem we do not understand. This brief essay has explored only a fraction of the avenues to freedom that will take us to a world without slavery. If we really want to end slavery we have to get past outrage and focus on analysis, then build practical tools and solutions from that analysis without stinting on resources. We stand at a moment in human history where our economies, governments, understanding, moral beliefs, and our hearts, are aligned in a constellation that can bring slavery to an end. Will this be our gift to our children and their children or just another missed opportunity?